The use of electronic business cards was originally proposed by the Versit Consortium in 1995 and subsequently taken up by the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC). The IMC has since developed a number of standards for electronic business cards such as the vCard or hCard, the latest of which is the open standard vCard v3.0. The vCard v3.0. is defined under two Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) documents; i.e. under Request for Comments (RFC) 2425 (MIME Content-Type for Directory Information) and under RFC 2426 (MIME Directory Profile). As defined in the standards, both vCard and hCard can contain metadata, semantic information, graphics and images, and even audio or video clips. As defined in the standards, therefore, both vCard and the hCard are mere passive information elements.
One example of the use of vCards is discussed in European Patent Application No. EP 1589730 entitled “Method for Management of vCards”. EP 1589730 is directed to a method for creating the vCards on a mobile terminal and exchanging the vCards between mobile terminal and other devices. Under the method of EP 1589730 the vCard is stored as image data in a JPEG file by inserting the vCard data in MIME type into the JPEG header.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,263 to Beaton et al entitled “Electronic Business Cards” discusses a method for providing electronic business cards for a communication device. Under the method of Beaton, business cards are created using CLID information, transferred among users of a telephone network, and used to initiate a call automatically.
Another system which utilises the vCard platform is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,246,099 to Feldhahn. Feldhahn allows individuals to maintain current contact information in another individual's contact software without having to individually notify the receiving individual or manually resend the updated contact information to the individual. Static contact information for an individual is stored on a central server and is assigned a globally unique ID. The static contact information includes a dynamic link containing a creator's globally unique ID that may be utilized by recipients of the contact information to retrieve updated contact information.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,493,015 to Desai describes an electronic business card system which provides a compact and portable system to read and store business card data from business cards having computer readable data stored on computer readable storage media on the business cards. The electronic business card system utilizes a reader coupled to a computer control system. The electronic business card system also provides organization and manipulation capabilities for the business card data accepted by the electronic business card system.
While electronic business card such as the vCard or hCard can be employed in a number of applications, the functionality of the electronic business cards is at present somewhat limited. It would be clearly advantageous to extend the functionality of such cards so that they include functions, scripts, and actionable elements. The present invention seeks to address such limitation of the existing electronic business card standards and implementation.